


The Terror of Rushy Hollow

by Vulgarweed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Folklore, Fusion, Gen, Halloween story, Horror, Pastiche, Spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:38:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2541326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One dark autumn night in the Shire, a rejected suitor leaves a harvest festival with a heavy heart - and a head swimming with eerie stories. Particularly of a new terror never seen in the Shire before: the ghastly spectre the locals call the Faceless Horseman.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Those familiar with The Red Book of Westmarch will recognise this as a rustic, romanticised, and garbled hobbit-centric account of certain alarming events that occurred in the Shire in the autumn of TA 3018, on the eve of the War of the Ring.</p>
<p>Those familiar with more recent literature will note that this story bears such a strong resemblance to the plot of Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," one realises Mr Irving <i>must</i> have had some passing acquaintance with Middle-earth folklore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Terror of Rushy Hollow

This is a tale told in the Shire that goes back to the time before the King. It is a tale to frighten the children, told when the nights grow long and the harvest is done, but for the last dregs left in the field for the queer folk who walk in the night.

No real terror has touched our land in many a year, and there are few now living who recall rumours of wars and fell doings far away, and evil things that crossed our borders and brought war even into the hearts of some of our own.

There are those who wish we would not tell such tales as this at all. But then, there have also always been those among us who loved stories – and loved them most of all when the danger they speak of was far away and long ago.

This story perhaps began when Goodenough Grubb of Needlehole passed through the East Farthing and then settled just across the Brandywine from Buckland to become the schoolmaster and teach the children their letters, perhaps in the hope of eventually getting a reference to even tutor children of the Big Folk in Bree. There were those who looked askance at such social-climbing in Hobbiton, and he had hoped his chances might be greater among the queer, adventure-prone Tooks and Brandybucks. He took up a small and respectable smial not far from the meeting of the Brandywine with the Stockbrook (for even he could not be so avant-garde as to consider a house, not just yet).

He set up a small tutorage practice, armed with a very dry old alphabet primer and a book telling of the unexciting doings of all the great old hobbit families, with all the best parts of local legend removed, downplayed, or explained away into banality. This was his cover, for it would not do to be thought of as odd. In his heart, though, he was a credulous creature who loved to feel a thrill of fear at tales of terror. The giant white wolves who had terrorized the Shire during the Fell Winter; the growling, savage Orcs confronted by the great Bullroarer Took; the whispering and walking trees of the Old Forest with no love for two-legged kind; the eerie fogs and fell whispers of the Barrow-Downs beyond; the strange fellow in yellow boots who may have once driven a hobbit mad with his poetry; all these half-remembered legends awakened in his mind when night fell, and drove him to put blankets on his windows and have double-barred doors installed.

But by bright light of day he consoled himself with his dry genealogies and his arithmetic sums, and was quick to tamp down the excesses of young hobbit minds with such, and try to pretend he did not fervently believe in the persuasive glamours of evil wizards or the unnatural cries of creatures that were not really birds.

Goodenough Grubb allowed himself to indulge in such tales only at the little inn, the Golden Perch, when he had a good quantity of their splendid beer in him, or in the company of the hobbit goodwives, with their plump bosoms and their voluptuous pantries, who would sometimes suffer him to sit by of an evening while they did their spinning and their canning, sharing such half-remembered, nonsensical lore as they knew.

He pretended he had never heard any of them before – not of Bogo Proudfoot, found at the base of a tree in the Old Forest (or rather, nothing was found of him but his splendid feet, the hair on them still oiled and styled, maintaining his vanity even as he was, presumably devoured), or any of the tales of Mad Baggins, who, it was said, had once paid a dragon to set flame to his enemies, and most of all, the stories of a new terror that the lads at the pub go pale: the Faceless Horseman. This was described as a robed black shadow, tall even for Big Folk, upon a black horse with glaring eyes, sniffing and hissing, clinking with mail and sword – dark and terrible against the autumn sky.

 

Only the ale and the beer and the cider kept away the terrors from poor Goodenough's long walks home, and that did not suffice to cover the way his senses sharpened, horribly overattuned to every snap of twig and swish of grass, and groan of the wind in the creaking trees. The leaps and stomps of a rutting billygoat in the meadow above the road were enough to send him into a quivering, moaning sort of terrified lope homeward, convinced that the ghastly, black-robed spectre of the Faceless Horseman had come all the way from its evil land for the sole purpose of running him down until his heart stopped with fright.

Once he reached his home, he double-barred the door and placed a chair against it and huddled into his feather bed, wrapping himself up in blankets until he himself resembled a hooded wraith, giving the game away with his chattering teeth. Yet when the nightmare subsided, the thoughts that sang him off to sleep were of a creature much more common and pleasant to the eye than a goblin or a wight or a hungry tree – yet in its way just as mysterious and dangerous: a hobbit-lass.

For often of a summer evening, Goodenough was suffered to bring his lute to musical interludes at a grand smial within the sprawling warrens of Brandy Hall. Holding court at these sessions was the lovely Tulip Brandybuck, daughter of a wealthy cousin of the grand old squire himself, and heir to a most splendid farmstead full of red apples and fat pigs and geese. She was a blossoming lass of two-and-thirty, soon to come of age, and she was rosy-cheeked and plump and full of life. The hair on her feet looked soft like a rabbit's fur, and her eyes were merry.

She was, it was said by the shrewish oldwives, perhaps no better than she should be, but she showed Goodenough some passing kindness, and perhaps the occasional wink and bend of her bosom, a girlish toss of her skirts to display her solid, downy calves as she danced not-quite-demurely. And how could he not be struck with love when he saw the glorious burrow she would inherit, with its sloping beams and shimmering windows, with its vast and well-stocked pantry and its deep wine cellar that seemed as bottomless as the Dwarven mines of the Mad Baggins tales, and every bit as full of treasure (with considerably less dragon).

Goodenough knew little of courting, and in a rare moment of self-awareness understood that the lady might not see him as much of a catch – for he knew he was thin for a hobbit, and unfortunately sparse-haired and large-nosed, and at the moment (temporarily only) hardly in the best of positions with regards to the upkeep of a household. She certainly had no shortage of other suitors. All of whom of course distrusted and disliked each other immensely, but were quick to form a circle of brawling, laddish hostility when faced with the common enemy of a newcomer.

Foremost among these was the brash and bold Griffo Burrowes, the strutting scion of the up-and-coming, social-climbing Burrowes family – real-estate dealers they were, untrusted by the finest old families yet, but as their wealth increased, so did their esteem. To win the heart and hand of a Brandybuck lass would be a fine feather in their cap, and “Griff,” as he was called by his little herd of admiring friends approaching courting the way he did everything else – boastfully. Regardless, it was said that the fair Tulip did not entirely disregard his attentions.

A wiser hobbit, or a more timid one (perhaps the same thing on some occasions) would have backed away and ceded the field as lost, but Goodenough Grubb was made of sterner stuff than he first seemed. Just the sight of Griff's sleek red pony Foxfire tethered outside the grand agricultural smial was enough to put off most, but not this good-natured, persistent fellow. Bending like a willow but deep-rootedly stubborn, he was confident in his placid nature, and surely the lovely Tulip had seen through to his steadfast heart. Indeed, it was seen in the village that Griff’s feisty pony had been seen less often tethered to the household post.

 

It was the night of the grand harvest feast at Brandy Hall - when all of Buckland, and the part of the East Farthing that wasn’t afraid to cross a river for a fine spread of food (mostly Tooks and their neighbours) - would be feasting and telling tales and singing and dancing late into the long night. Goodenough believed this would bring the final success of his quest; amid all the delicious food, he and Tulip would dance, and cut the most striking figure seen in the Shire since Tulip’s third cousin Melilot danced the scandalous springle-ring the night of Mad Baggins’s final disappearance.

 

He dismissed his pupils early - and if he’d paid more attention to childish prattlings, he’d have noticed that his charges were unusually subdued, and nowhere near as joyous at the early reprieve as they might have been - in fact, nearly reluctant to sally forth into the golden evening, clinging to each other in twos and threes. He'd have heard the talk, picked up from their parents and older siblings, of another sighting of that ghastly spectre, the Faceless Horseman, the night before, and much closer to home than the last. He'd have heard an argument between two hobbit children who'd heard different stories on the same night, and didn't believe this apparition could be in two places at once.

But as much as he may have had an appreciation of eerie tales, perhaps the result of some deep-buried Tookish blood far down in the roots of his family tree, Goodenough was hearing none of this talk, being far too preoccupied with presenting himself in the most attractive light. He preened his thin face in the looking-glace, took out his finest waistcoat, slicked the thin hair on his head and feet with a scented oil, and finally addressed himself to the broken-down old pony named Mugwort, whom he'd borrowed from a slightly grudging neighbor. Mugwort was bony and swaybacked and seemed to sustain himself mostly on grouchiness – pony and rider presented quite an image, all elbows, knees, toes, and hipbones. He'd be no match for Foxfire in speed, but could probably hold his own in the matter of kicking and biting.

It was a fine autumn evening, with the yellow sun setting and making the golden leaves of elms and alders shine bright as coins as they fell in the soft breeze across the path. Anticipation fluttered in Goodenough's belly as he drew close to the great sprawling warren, all lit up with warm golden firelight and decorated with grain and and garlands of autumn leaves and fat orange pumpkins. Music and laughter sounded from inside the house – a fiddler and a drummer had already set to work, and the teens and tweens were dancing merrily, stamping the floors with their feet and leaping lightly near to the ceilings.

Miss Tulip presided proudly over the table – which was really several, occupying the entire front room, and oh, the display laid out was beyond my wildest dreams as well as yours: a vast variety of cakes, roast fowl, fresh beef and pork, honeyed and buttered vegetables of every variety, sweetmeats and pies and puddings, apples and plums and peaches and grapes, raw and candied, firm and juicy, eggs and fish and breads of every description. This – this – was what Grubb wanted to be heir to, even above and beyond the charms of the lady.

As the night wore on, they danced and feasted, and Miss Tulip's proud father seemed to convey his blessing on the young suitor as he coaxed her into a dance that would have been demure but for the wild herky-jerky of Grubb's overcommitted elbows and knees. As they danced together, Grubb at least spared little thought for Griff Burrowes, who gnawed a goose leg and quietly seethed (and if he did anything quietly, it was well to pay heed).

The feasting and dancing wound down, as hobbit children fell asleep and young couples staggered out to find bushes that still had enough leaves to cover them, and the elderly folks aired out their own bones and settled in with their hot toddies and pipes to while away the darkening hours with reminiscences and tales. At first the stories were cosy and harmless, of courtships and childhoods and family legacies, of hole-digging and farming and visiting neighbours. But as always when the lights burned low, Goodenough Grubb liked to turn to the sort of story accounted mildly scandalous - whispers of dark and eerie things in faraway places and long-ago times. So close to the hedges that guarded Buckland from the whispering, uncanny Old Forest, perhaps such stories had a force of their own. Perhaps there were things about them that wanted to be told, not entirely by the hobbits’ own knowing choice. 

As they talked late into the night, vivid images planted themselves in Grubbs’s mind. The head of the goblin gone flying by Bullroarer Took’s club stayed awake and growled out curses upon the Shirefolk in a barbarous language. The white wolves of the Fell Winter still stalked abroad, gnawing eternally on the bones of hobbitkind who died in the snow and were devoured before they could be found in the spring thaw. Long, long ago, the Shire sent some bold young lads who were skilled with the bow to the aid of the Men in the North, to fight off the terror of Angmar. None returned, and some who have walked the Barrow-Downs in the fog say that the dead of that terrible battle may still walk, chattering wights in white robes and jewels, blank of eye and cold of bone. By bright light of day, all these dreadful things seemed far away and fanciful, but not quite as much when the sun set earlier and earlier, and some said that the very trees leaned close to hear the stories.

There was one of a newer vintage - a tale was told, in a shivering whisper and with a hint of great sorrow, that the Faceless Horseman had been spotted very close by, whispering in a foul, uncanny voice to Falco Cotton, searching for Mad Baggins who had not been seen in the Shire for many a year. In search of his treasure, no doubt, yet there was something about this rider in black that lead one to think that perhaps he - or it - had a less wholesome and more sinister purpose than mere normal robbery. Old Dahlia Bracegirdle had fallen to the ground quite stricken with fright and had not recovered her wits and perhaps never would. (Goodenough that this was perhaps no great loss, as she had never been in possession of much wit.) Regardless, though, the younger Master Baggins of Bag End had disappeared, it was said. Perhaps fleeing the terrifying rider, perhaps taken away by him. Goodenough shuddered, to think that a supernatural shadow should creep even into the heart of such a normally respectable town as Hobbiton. Why, the storyteller couldn’t say for sure it was true, but he’d heard that a Proudfoot out by Frogmorton had been trampled under those massive hooves and even now lay near death.  


While Goodenough was enjoying the vicarious shiver this gave him, count on old Griff Burrowes to swagger forth and break the mood with his boasts. It was absolutely true there was a terrible Faceless Horseman about, for Griff himself had seen the evil spirit just the previous night - and challenged him to a race for gold. Surely his Foxfire was at least the match of any Big Horse, particularly one that had to carry a tall Man wearing armour. He claimed that he’d been winning, but at the Brandywine Bridge, the creature vanished with a shriek in a puff of smoke. There was much murmuring at this, and perhaps a suggestion that this tale stretched credibility perhaps more than was polite - but it did not come from the lips of Grubb, who was little inclined to speak his mind freely in such company.

Gradually the evening wound down as the pipeweed dwindled and the embers burnt low, and the tired, woozy faces were lit by the glow of diminishing pipes. Goodenough Grubb lingered, waiting for his moment to rendezvous with his lovely hostess.

What passed between them, I do not know, but Goodenough Grubb did not leave that hall as a happy hobbit. Oh, cruel, capricious hobbit-maids - whatever hope he had been given and nourished so dearly was now dashed. Crestfallen and embarrassed, he saddled up grumpy old Mugwort and headed back towards the Brandywine Bridge, to resume his bachelor life.

It was the chill turn of midnight when Grubb rode out of the grounds. The weather had changed, and not for the better. What had been a fine clear day had turned to a clouded night, chill and unpleasantly damp. A fog was rising quickly, wettening the grass and leaves and causing unsettling splashes and drippings in the wood. The pale moon only showed his half-face in teasing glimpses as clouds glided across in quick, shivering veils, eventually hiding it entirely.

All the reassuring little crickets had gone to bed, and there was nothing now but the cries of owls, and the occasional splashing and splishing in the little marsh that lay beside the road and grew wider as the river drew closer. Between the trees in the wood, all was pitch darkness, and from time to time a twig would snap as some woodland predator crept up on its prey. Grubb’s mind was racing with all the evening’s tales as the fog grew thicker and thicker.

Something huge and black loomed up out of the mist and he shivered and almost shouted - but it was only a tree. Was it? It was _that_ tree, an ancient, brooding beech with immense, gnarled limbs that sprawled out in all directions and seemed to ripple like boneless arms in the drizzling mist. It seemed to raise its roots up from the ground to make his pony stumble, and seemed to lean branches down to pluck at him, an almost fungal gleam appearing on its smooth silver skin.

He was almost completely, thoroughly certain that this tree that had stood there for hundreds of years had been on the _other_ side of the road just a few hours before. But then, he had drank more apple brandy tonight than was his custom. An owl hooted from its branches as a twig plucked at his collar behind, and his pony shivered and cantered forward a few lazy feet.

Calm yourself, he told himself. We are nearly to the bridge. Queer things haunt the Old Forest side of the river, as we know. We have only to make the bridge, and then we will be free of evil trees and dreams of wights and worse. Teeth chattering and knees knocking on the pony’s ribs, he urged the beast further onward. But Mugwort was jerking his head from side to side, an eye rolling in his shaggy head, all-a twitch, almost hopping and bouncing sideways. It was one thing for Goodenough’s overactive imagination to frighten him - but the placid _pony_ was also greatly agitated.

Then the horrible loud noise came, and Grubb moaned and whimpered under his own breath to hear it: a shrill, piercing shriek, high and lonely and infinitely angry, shattering the night with pure nameless malice, spreading madness. It seemed to come from a hill very close by, and it froze his heart with ice. The pony under him skittered and started to run forward stupidly and blindly through the thickening fog, and Grubb could no longer even be sure if they were even headed for the bridge anymore. Mugwort kept charging, and then reared up with a pitiful whine when the mist and darkness coalesced into a terrifying figure.

It was a great, ragged mountain of a man-shaped creature on a high black horse, blocking the path. It seemed to be made out of hostile night, its trailing black robes leading up to its hooded head - and oh, the night was dark, but alas for him, Grubb was now close enough to look up under that hood, and saw only blackness, thicker than a starless sky, thicker than the darkness of a dead faint, black and featureless as the darkness inside the grave, lightless forever. He began to whimper and shiver even harder, paralysed with terror, waiting only to die of it.

It pointed straight at him - a long hand in a jointed steel gauntlet, sharp and wicked. Worst of all, it _spoke,_ and its hissing voice scraped like blade on bone. _”I seek the one called Baggins. Where is he? Tell me and be rewarded. Lie to me and be destroyed.”_

“I - I don’t know -” Grubb yelped, sobbing. “I don’t know him! He’s gone - he’s dead - I don’t know!” 

_”Liar!”_ said the voice, the sound of a tomb-vault falling shut, and the huge black horse lunged forward, close enough to show Grubb the blood on its flanks and the fire in its eyes. 

Mugwort lurched backwards and turned so swiftly that the girth of his saddle split, and Grubb had to hang on to his neck and the let the saddle fall off underneath him, so as not to be pitched. There was no hope. There was no hope at all. The Faceless Horseman’s pitch-black steed moved swift as a breath of plague, great hooves churning the turf as it chased the terrified Shire pony. 

They’d got turned around, and the bridge was up ahead, and then Grubb nearly did die, ice squeezing his heart and his guts as he heard that bone-chilling, despair-bringing screech again - from the west this time, and across the River, and coming closer. 

_There was more than one of them._

We will never know for sure what happened next. What is known is that Mugwort was found the next morning with his saddle missing and bridle broken, grazing nervously on the edges of Farmer Maggot’s rich pastures. Old Maggot himself said he knew nothing of the matter, but there was something behind his eyes that suggested otherwise. It was considered unwise and impolite to pry. Perhaps Mugwort had realised he could reduce his own danger by ditching his rider. His saddle was found trampled - under, it seemed, more than one set of large, bloodstained hooves. Goodenough Grubb’s hat was found several hundred yards down, in a patch of reeds by the riverside. It was generally thought that in he must have been thrown or fallen into the river and drowned. Griff Burrowes, who married the blooming Tulip in the springtime, claimed to know nothing of the matter but that the Faceless Horseman had indeed been seen again - and heard this time - not at all far off. 

Speculation was rampant, and all sorts of tall tales began to develop and spread, encouraged by further sightings of fell equestrian spectres that sniffed and threatened and demanded information about a Baggins of Hobbiton - and then they disappeared altogether, presumably returning to whatever horrible place they’d come from and never seen in the Shire again. 

But sometimes at night still to this day, young hobbits will scare each other as part of courting-games (perhaps a pillow-casing dyed black may have been employed on some occasions), and the old ones will still shudder and draw their shawls closer against the chill; the most traditional old goodwives will insist to this day that Goodenough Grubb was spirited away to an evil land, and that’s why it’s no good to delve too deep into tales of things that don’t concern us. 

Still, I've been told that on one occasion where this tale was repeated at a disreputable tavern in Bree some many years later, a lean, dapper hobbit who’d had perhaps a few too many was heard to mutter that that was not exactly how it happened. And there was a rumour that perhaps the disappointed suitor had not drowned nor been stolen away to the land of nightmares, but had simply taken the opportunity to change his name and set up shop elsewhere, where his humiliation would not be known. 

Or so some would say. I don’t believe one half of it myself. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, all you Shirelings.
> 
> This story has no relationship with the current Sleepy Hollow TV show, or the Johnny Depp movie. Straight up Irving bookverse fusion/pastiche going on here.
> 
> I am greatly indebted to Karen Wynn Fonstad's _The Atlas of Middle-earth_ for my Shire and Buckland geography. (All errors in that regard are definitely mine alone.)


End file.
